One 4-pound Jack-o’-lantern pumpkin, emptied of seeds and fibre and peeled

1 cup maple syrup

1/3 cup butter

A few drops of cider vinegar

The recipe calls for the pumpkin to be peeled: the easiest way to achieve this, I found, was to cut it into manageable-size pieces and then cut the flesh away from the skin. Cut the flesh into thin strips, about 1/8 inch each, place on a large baking sheet, and set aside.

In a pot with high sides, boil the maple syrup until it is caramelized: it will thicken and start to smell like caramel. Remove from heat and add the butter. Pour over the pumpkin slices and mix well. Roast in a 400-degree oven for an hour, stirring every 10 or 15 minutes, until pumpkin is tender and caramelized. Purée in blender or food processor until mixture is smooth. Add a few drops of cider vinegar.

Good with toasted brioche, over yogurt or simply eaten with a spoon. The spread will keep in the fridge for three weeks or several months in the freezer.

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Pumpkin and Red Lentil Soup

Makes 8 portions

Louise Gagnon provided the recipe for this healthful pumpkin soup; I used a sugar pumpkin to make it and it was warm and soothing on a raw autumn day.

2 cups uncooked red lentils

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, pressed

5 cups chicken or vegetable broth

3 carrots, diced finely

3 branches celery, diced finely

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon herbes de Provence

Salt and pepper, to taste

21/2 cups pumpkin purée

In a large pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion, cover the pot and cook on low heat for about 20 minutes, mixing from time to time. Remove the cover and continue to cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the onions become caramelized. Add the garlic and cook for 30 more seconds. Add the broth, the lentils, the carrots, celery and bay leaf and the herbes de Provence. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil and then leave to summer for about 15 minutes or until the lentils, carrots and celery are tender. Add the pumpkin purée and heat through. Serve garnished with flat-leaf parsley.

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Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good

This recipe, for a hollowed-out pumpkin filled with bread, cheese, garlic and cream, makes “2 very generous servings or 4 or more genteel servings,” suggests James Beard Award-winning food writer and author Dorie Greenspan. The dish is in her divine book Around my French Table (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

The recipe is from a woman whose husband grows pumpkins on a farm outside Lyon — it came to Greenspan via the woman’s sister, who is a friend of hers — and it is more an outline than a precise recipe, she writes. “Since pumpkins come in unpredictable sizes, cheeses and breads differ, and baking times depend on how long it takes for the pumpkin to get soft enough to pierce with a knife, being precise is impossible.”

The dish can be cut in wedges and served, or you can just dig in with a big spoon and pull meat from the pumpkin into the filling, she writes. Works as a cold-weather main, followed by hearty salads, or alongside a festive turkey meal. The pumpkin, Greenspan suggests, can also be filled with cooked rice, perhaps with cooked kale or spinach added to it. It works without bacon as well, or with cooked sausage meat, nuts, or chunks of apple or pear or pieces of chestnut. It’s not a difficult recipe, and the result is impressive — but the cooked, filled, pumpkin can be a bit wobbly to transport and nervous-making for novices.

Centre a rack in the oven and line a baking sheet with parchment, or find a Dutch oven with a diameter a bit larger than your pumpkin. If you use a pot, the pumpkin might stick and so you’ll have to serve it from the pot, Greenspan writes. If you bake it on a baking sheet, it can be presented free-standing, but a filled, softened, pumpkin can be cumbersome and unwieldy: still, this is her preferred method.

With a study knife — and caution — cut a cap out of the top of the pumpkin, working at a 45-degree angle. Make sure to cut off enough of the top for you to work inside the pumpkin. Clear the seeds and strings from inside the pumpkin and the cap. Season the inside of the pumpkin generously with salt and pepper and place on the baking sheet or in the pot. Toss the bread, cheese, garlic, bacon and herbs together in a bowl. Season with pepper and pack the mix into the pumpkin. The pumpkin should be well filled. Stir the cream with the nutmeg and some salt and pepper and pour it into the pumpkin: “You don’t want the ingredients to swim in cream, but you do want them nicely moistened,” she writes.

Put the cap in place and bake the pumpkin for about 2 hours – check after 90 minutes – or until everything inside the pumpkin is bubbling and the flesh is tender enough to be pierced easily with the tip of a knife. Remove the cap during the last 20 minutes so that the accumulate liquid can bake away and the top of the stuffing brown a bit.

When the pumpkin is ready, “carefully, very carefully — it’s heavy. hot and wobbly — bring it to the table or transfer it to a platter that you’ll bring to the table.”

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